Earth Day Challenges Us to Good Earth Stewardship — But Where Can We Get Reliable Information?

One area of life in which to serve Christ is Biblical Earth stewardship — what I also call “godly dominion,” drawing on the language of Genesis 1:28 “And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’”

The annual return of “Earth Day” (April 22) challenges all of us to consider whether we’re exercising godly or ungodly dominion. Over the past few decades, many Christians have thought a lot about that.

I’ve been one of them, working with the Coalition on Revival in the 1980s–1990s, writing three books (Prosperity and Poverty: The Compassionate Use of Resources in a World of Scarcity [1988], Prospects for Growth: A Biblical View of Population, Resources, and the Future [1990], and Where Garden Meets Wilderness: Evangelical Entry into the Environmental Debate [1997]) and many articles and lectures, and teaching on it at both Covenant College and Knox Theological Seminary.

A coalition of theologians, pastors, ministry leaders, scientists, economists, policy experts, and committed laymen, the Cornwall Alliance is the world’s leading evangelical voice promoting environmental stewardship and economic development built on Biblical principles. We seek to magnify the glory of God in creation, the wisdom of His truth in environmental stewardship, the kindness of His mercy in lifting the needy out of poverty, and the wonders of His grace in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The Cornwall Alliance integrates the work of theologians, scientists, and economists to promote, simultaneously, these three things:

Godly dominion over the Earth: not selfish abuse of the Earth, and not just recycling and using low-energy light bulbs and reducing toxic emissions, but men and women, created in the image of God, working together to enhance Earth’s fruitfulness, beauty, and safety, to the glory of God and the benefit of our neighbors, thus addressing simultaneously the two Great Commandments: to love God, and to love our neighbor.

Economic development for the world’s poorest — think in terms of sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia and Latin America — by promoting God-given rights to religious, civil, and economic liberty with the combinations of political institutions like property rights, voluntary trade, and limited, accountable government to protect those rights.

Proclamation and defense of the gospel of Jesus Christ — justification by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, who died for our sins, was buried, and rose again from the dead — in a world permeated by an environmentalist movement most of whose worldview, theology, and ethics are unbiblical, whose science and economics are often of low quality, whose policies therefore often fail to protect the natural world effectively but harm the world’s poor by slowing, stopping, or reversing economic development, and whose teachings on God, creation, humanity, sin, and salvation offer a false hope to sinners in need of salvation and societies in need of justice, freedom, and decent standards of living.

Over the years, Cornwall’s scholars have produced hundreds of articles and several major papers. We take the inerrant Word of God as the most important standard of truth and integrate the insights of theology, science, and economics to produce creative analyses of and solutions to significant problems. Some of our more prominent papers are

The Cornwall Stewardship Agenda— a growing document setting forth basic principles and practices of godly dominion, economic development, and the social institutions that promote order, freedom, and justice.

Our 13-part video series, Resisting the Green Dragon, with 12 lectures by 9 scholars, plus a documentary, and our book by Christian physicist and environmental theologian Dr. James Wanliss, Resisting the Green Dragon: Dominion, Not Death, have been used by many churches in Sunday school classes and small groups, and by home and private schools. The video series was shown in its entirety on the National Religious Broadcasters’ television network.

About that pastoral training — it’s like nothing you seen before! It features training in Bible, theology, preaching, pastoral counseling, and other subjects that are part of a normal seminary education, of course. But to equip pastors to serve desperately poor, remote African villages, it adds teaching and equipping pastors to become self-sustaining agro-entrepreneurs.

A year ago I returned from Uganda, where I witnessed some of CVT’s cooperation with local pastors and Christian leaders who were doing these things in remote villages.

Edward Kasaija, a veteran entrepreneur, pastor, and leader in the Presbyterian Church in Uganda and the Tentmaker Project, is a model. His integrated agricultural enterprise raising chickens for meat and eggs, cows and goats for meat and milk, pigs, and vegetables, fruits, and grains not only feeds his multi-generation family but also provides products he markets and — the fruits, grains, and vegetables — feeds his livestock.

Pastor Edward’s brilliantly designed enterprise is entirely cycle-through, with rainwater from roofs stored in cisterns for the livestock or sluiced to wash manure into fields for fertilizer. Nothing goes to waste. Even the chicken litter not only fertilizes fields but also feeds cattle and pigs.

But best of all, it also enables him to train others to start and grow their own integrated agricultural enterprises, support themselves while planting and pastoring churches in poor villages, and train yet more to do the same. The self-replicating cycle reflects Paul’s instruction to Timothy, “what you have heard from me … entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also” (2 Timothy 2:2). It also models how profit-seeking entrepreneurs can lead a whole society out of poverty.